You're lucky I'm there To stop people doing the things That you know they are dying to do

See if you can tell which of the following images comes from where

One of them comes from a dystopic comic which encourages its adolescent readers to whack off on weapons porn, festishistic centrefolds of pitiless, fascistic lawmen and mental imagery of a society in ruins

The other comes from 2000AD

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The Real (sic.) Source of the British Riots

I don't personally agree with everything Stefan Molyneux says or implies in the following bout of right wing libertarian axe-grinding but I still think it's worth a spin...

The interesting parts for me are not the assertions I agree with but the assertions I disagree with - and asking myself why I disagree with them

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Your cut out and keep souvenir map of the London Riots 2011

The latest news just in is that NATO has recognized a group of rioters in Hackney as being the legitimate government of Great Britain and will start bombing the shit out of schools and hospitals across the country tomorrow morning

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Announcing FF15MP's new Property and Investment supplement

One thing this blog has always lacked is its own Property feature.

I'm going to rectify that right now and inaugurate my new UK Property supplement with a high quality investment opportunity that's only just come to the market...

BUY NOW!!!

Ordinarily, I wouldn't publicise the existence of such a screaming bargain and would hope to quietly snap it up for myself but a) I do not have 250 Large to spend on a cell, and b) I am not insane

In its favour, as well as being in a desirable (sic.) part of North London and close to a railway station, when the time comes, anyone shrewd enough to invest in this compact and bijou residence can have their executor shovel a few spadefuls of earth on it and have it double as their grave

Only the chances are that whoever buys this place will die still owing money on it. So, their corpse would have to turfed out and dumped on a tip and the property put back on the market for the next smart cookie to buy it

Assuming a 10% deposit, a loan of £225,000 at a 5% mortgage rate, this slave hutch can be yours for £1,350 (repayment) or £950 (interest only) per month. When the banking industry decides it wants to take some more money out of your pocket and mortgage interest rates go up to 8% that will be £1,750 and £1,500 respectively. At 10% that will be £2,050 and £1,850

The really insane thing is that I know people who will tell me how much sense this makes. People who have made a *lot* of money flipping properties in the same area that are even more ghastly than this one

The trick is the flipping part

Millions of people in the UK have been playing a nationwide game of financial pass the parcel and as long as they're not the ones left holding the over-priced property with the eye-watering mortgage when the music stops they've won

Only they won't have won, because the economic lives of millions of people left holding over-priced properties with eye-watering mortgages are going to go tits up and everyone is going to have to bear the cost. People who played the property game and those who stayed out of it, all of them.

(As an aside, I understand typical mortgage rates in the UK to be currently in the region of 5% to 6% whereas the savings rate on a typical bog standard deposit account is 0.25%. That's a 20 fold gross profit on the banks' cost of funds. An absolutely eye-watering level of usury by any measure. I suspect that there isn't much outcry over that as most people don't have much in the way of savings and those who do made them off the back of property inflation. However, the banks are getting a lot of that 0.25% money from the government (i.e. the citizens of the UK) and then charging people 5%+ to borrow it back. So, one way or another, people are funding their own debt slavery, whether they are conscious of it or not)

And whether you smell the whiff of conspiracy, or plain stupidity, it's worth asking yourself why virtually no-one, actually I believe no-one, in the mainstream press or government ever questioned the sustainability of house prices rising three, four, five times faster than wages indefinitely. The insane and ruinous inflation of the cost of a fundamental requirement of life, as necessary as food or water, was trumpeted to the heavens

Why are all of those fuckers claiming the Crunch was an unpredictable surprise?

How dumb would you have to be not to see it coming? At the very least this demonstrates that the entire existing system of financial regulation and education needs razing to the ground and rebuilding from scratch

That is if you assume our system of financial regulation and education was put in place to protect and nuture the ordinary muppet on the street.

I've worked in finance so I don't

So, we can't afford our own homes, mum and dad are both working to pay the bills, mum and dad are also maxed out on debt, deposit interest rates have been reduced to virtually zero, most of our shit is manufactured by 3rd world slaves, the UK's sold all its oil, most of the infrastructure has been sold off, the financial future of the next few generations has been mortgaged to the hilt, a bugger load of spend has been hidden temporarily in PFI deals and the government has written a lot of bad cheques. Like a junkie or a gambler with an incurable addiction the UK, and the rest of the West, has sold, pawned, borrowed or stolen everything it can just to get through each day, with no thought of tomorrow

Now what?

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Austerity

...Meanwhile, back in the UK, non conspiraloon acquaintances of mine who over the years have endured my predictions of financial and social Armageddon with long-suffering, and occasionally amused patience, have lately taken to conceding that yes I may have been onto something. A little over-the-top maybe but there was a kernel of prescience hidden in my, and a relatively small number of like-minded souls’, OTT ramblings

Fuck it, even the David Ickes and Alex Jones of this world have had to modify their speil to acknowledge the pre-eminent role that manipulation of finance capital plays in the world’s ills (an observation that was singularly absent earlier in their careers)

The Bank of England - just swarming with neo-liberal, pan-dimensional, alien space lizards ...apparently

The growing awareness that something is very wrong with the world of money is now mirrored in the Official Narrative of what the future holds for the UK and other similarly fucked-up countries

Without so much as an apology for all the horseshit they've been shovelling for the last decade, the mainstream UK media have quietly binned the 'No More Boom and Bust' Official Narrative and replaced it with the ‘Austerity’ Official Narrative

As far as I can glean from reading the UK press and chatting with people in the UK, Austerity is supposedly going to take the form of some kind of wifi-enabled rerun of the 1970s. Fuck it, some of the older folks even get nostalgic about the prospect and talk of a Golden Age when people made do, all mucked in together and were better off for it

Hmmm, music and cinema were definitely better back then

... well, some of it was

1970s 2.0 will, however, not play out quite the same way in the UK for one or two small reasons...

- One billion more competing workers from India and the Far East
- Computers
- No North Sea oil
- No coal
- Bugger all in the way of productive industry
- No organised labour worth its name to keep ordinary people's wages up with inflation when all that money printing really kicks in in earnest
- A lot less social cohesion

...for starters

Things could easily get very nasty indeed, for a generation or more

Unless, that is, people get together and seriously overhaul the way they go about their lives

(On the positive side, the UK is still a world-leading producer of weapons, mercenaries, unnecessary, arguably harmful, drugs, Ponzi schemes and money laundering. So, fingers crossed, if by some chance there happen to be a few really tasty wars, global pandemics and colossal financial frauds in the near future the outlook for UK plc isn't entirely bleak)

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Now, as it happens, I have been and continue to be optimistic about the UK’s, and other countries', long term future. The only fly in the ointment is that I believed and continue to believe that life is going to get really, really unpleasant in the UK, and other countries, in the short to medium term

Whilst chatting about this stuff with a chum the other day, she shared with me a favourite Engels quote...

'The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong - into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.'

Personally, I think that vision of the future needs updating a little to reflect the huge advances in technology that have been made since Engels' time.

Some anarchists would argue, as I referenced in my previous post, that you can view the countries of the world as a collection of human farms and the citizens of those countries as livestock...

and, if you pursue that analogy, it's an interesting exercise to ask yourself what do farmers do with their beasts of burden when they get their hands on tractors and other machinery?

Do the farmers let those animals graze and frolic in a quiet field somewhere or do they send them off for glue?



For that Engels' style vision of the future to work a lot of people are going to have to make, and demand, useful products that cannot be mass produced. There's a premium attached to labour-intensive produce, for sure, but if the benefits of mass production were more fairly shared people could afford it and would be happier and healthier for it

Now would be a very good time indeed for people to start digging a veggie patch and learning a honest, genuinely productive craft

...and not borrowing money to spank on tat, that would help as well

Though I'm not sure that I can see the State just sitting idly by if hordes of the newly unemployed start growing and making their own stuff and swapping it without any reference to paper money

Where’s the margin in that?

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Green Shoots of Recovery, Yay!!

Some debt porn nerd over at House Price Crash forum has put together a lovely little graph of average UK house prices as a multiple of average UK annual wages, based on data from the Nationwide Building Society going back to 1953...




Average property prices peaked a couple of years ago at over six times average wages. Every property crash in the last 50 years has seen property prices fall back to at least 3.5 times average wages. Which, if history repeats itself, would be a fucking excellent thing - unless anyone really thinks shackling future generations to a historically unsustainable ratio of housing costs to wages is a remotely sensible idea

Wages are either going to have to go up, lots.

Or house prices are going to have to fall further, lots

And I know which of the two options I think is most likely

That's it. That's the story

You are Here

And no amount of bollocks peddled by vested interests from the mainstream media, politics or business will change that


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No-one saw it coming. Well maybe not quite no-one...

Back in 2001/2 a couple of friends were thinking about buying houses and asked for my opinion on the future prospects of the UK housing market

My take was that, even back then, the cost of housing was moving ahead of historical affordability levels and there was no way that house prices could keep rising faster than people's wage rises.

I guestimated that house prices would peak in the Summer of 2003, then fall back 10-20%, quite sharply

Which, of course, didn't happen




or rather it did happen, but in nothing like my estimated timescale

My mistake was that back then, before my full-on Conspiraloonery days, I assumed that the people responsible for our government and banks were not amoral sociopaths; fully committed to the path of deliberately wrecking millions of lives

Only an amoral psychopath would have encouraged the boom to continue beyond the 2002/03 levels, to a point where the inevitable economic correction would have to be so large it would become a national, and international, calamity

Make no mistake, a ghastly economic crash was a 100%, guaranteed, dead cert, inevitable consequence of the way our economy was being run, and anyone who says no-one saw it coming is either a liar or a fucking idiot

Now, as it happens, I've concluded that only a minority of the people who claim that no-one saw it coming are liars.

The majority really are fucking idiots; easily manipulated, greedy, dissonant, fearful idiots

You can take pretty much anything you've even seen written or said in the mainstream media about economic and financial affairs over the last ten years and forget it. It was all Wrong and yet the people who earned a living peddling Wrong are still at their jobs peddling a new brand of Wrong. For all the good they did anyone, they may as well have stayed at home, playing with themselves and eating cheesy wotsits, and not bothered going into work for the last ten years

Better than a career in journalism or banking, especially when combined with self-abuse

The same also applies to millions of people employed in the service sector over the last decade. A ridiculous number of people have been whacking off, playing silly games and kidding themselves that they were engaged in meaningful work.They enjoyed an undeservedly high standard of material living off of worthless IOUs paid to foreigners who've been working in sweat shops and fields on their behalf.

So preoccupied did the British become with getting rich (sic.) off the back of shuffling paper that we took to importing several million immigrants to wait on us and wipe our kids' arses

This was all bonkers and wrong on so many levels

And there came a point where you would have to be an idiot yourself to believe that no-one in a position of power saw the inevitable collapse coming

It is also worth remembering that the infrastructure for a full-blown police state was being rushed-in at the same time the debt bubble was being inflated to calamitous levels

I now firmly believe that the people responsible for our governments and banks truly are amoral psychopaths, engaged in deliberate economic and social warfare against the rest of us, and the quality of my spooky predictive powers is now several orders of magnitude greater than it was seven or eight years ago

Put simply, if everything really was the result of a cock up rather than a conspiracy why is it that the apparent cock ups virtually always end up favouring the same class of people?

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And whilst on the subject of dissonant bullshit...

There are some interesting parallels between the mainstream coverage of the recent economic boom and the Man Made Global Warming narrative

Each involved people looking at graphs of recent upward trending data, extrapolating those trends way, way up and fabricating explanations as to why this time it is different and why the upward trend was going to continue for the foreseeable future.

Both groups of rampers, economic and MMGW, have had the bulk of the mainstream media, industry and government on their side

In opposition to the people who believe that Man Made Global Warming, like house prices, could only go up there was a minority of people arguing that global mean temperature, like house prices, is cyclic, that there are signs a turning point has been reached and a downturn could well be on the cards

If and when it is established that a turning point has been reached, we will doubtlessly be told that (virtually) no-one saw it coming and that the Man Made Global Warming advocates were acting on the consensus of opinion of the majority of the experts

Bullshit

As with predictions about which way the economy was heading, consensus counts for absolutely fuck all

Either something is right or it isn't

And popular climate 'science', as it is currently practiced, has a lot more to do with politics and story telling than hard, testable science

There's a world of difference between hard sciences like chemistry and physics, which involve testable, repeatable processes and the more complex, chaotic natural sciences, such a climatology and evolutionary theory; which involve making up stories to explain that which has already happened and which is unlikely to happen again in quite the same way

It is easy enough to whip up an experiment to prove or disprove a theory about gravity. A lot harder to come up with something repeatable and testable which explains where wombats came from or if it is going to snow in New Orleans next week

Which is why the often-repeated claims that Man Man Global Warming is all about hard-science are bollocks

Staring at graphs of natural systems and kidding yourself that you've come up with a computer model which tells you what's going to happen next, be it with the weather or the financial markets, is a mug's game and will inevitably end up with only one result.

My favourite comment from the 1,000 or so posted underneath this recent article. Reference to to 'serious' scientists, i.e. scientists who agree with the views of the commentator, is as good an indicator that the writer is an utter twunt as any I know.

And, remember, whenever commenting about MMGW underneath news articles, any stories about unusually cold temperatures or heavy snowfall are examples of 'weather'. Any stories about unusually high temperatures or Hurricane Katrina are examples of 'climate'. 'Climate' stories are inherently more significant than 'Weather' stories'

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A few days ago Lord Patel, because he knows I enjoy this stuff so much, sent me a copy of the latest press release from the Met Office. It's a corker...


30/12/2008 11:38

Met Office (National) (Met Office)

Pacific Continues to Influence Global Climate

2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.

According to climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia the global temperature is forecast to be more than 0.4 C above the long-term average. This would make 2009 warmer than the year just gone and the warmest since 2005.

During La Nina, cold waters rise to the surface to cool the ocean and land surface temperatures. The 2009 forecast includes an updated decadal forecast using a Met Office climate model. This indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.

Professor Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre said: "Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature. Warmer conditions in 2009 are expected because the strong cooling influence of the recent powerful La Nina has given way to a weaker La Nina. Further warming to record levels is likely once a moderate El Nino develops."

These cyclical influences can mask underlying warming trends as Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, explains: "The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 C, was 0.21 C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000." ENDS


Wow! Warmest year for four years! Maybe...

Outstanding!

The Met Office has now taken to reporting predictions, predictions from people with an unparalleled record for making shit predictions, as if they were fact.

They're getting pretty desperate now

and really beyond parody

And, sure enough, this prediction was faithfully reported as 'news' by the press agencies straight away

The implication of the Press Release it that the deep ocean is acting as a huge heat sink, hiding all that 200 years' worth of alleged surplus warming out of the way for the time being. I would love to see some data that proves it's actually warmer down there - because everything I've seen to date points to nothing of the sort

As with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, this MMGW thing is now getting beyond the point where the people ramping it can claim honest error. Their subjectivity has become quite blatant. We're heading into outright dishonesty now.

Just like our fucked up financial services industry, the MMGW lobby is trying to tide itself over with some short-term fudging; in the hope that things will somehow turn back their way before the fudging is more widely comprehended

And, as with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, I'm not claiming for a second that the majority of people who have Faith in MMGW are being deliberately dishonest - the boundless human capacity for self-delusion, dissonance, religious belief and self interest can account for much of what is going on

But not all of it

There is no good reason to believe that the top people behind the MMGW agenda, or our economy, do not understand the inevitable consequences of what they are doing

and there's every reason to believe that they do understand what they are doing

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Can anyone recommend a nice hand bag?

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edit: and cheers to anon for this little gem...

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The fine art of prediction

I can't put my finger on exactly when but at some point over the last six months a crossover point was reached when the alleged spoof news on The Daily Mash became more factual and less satirical than the current affairs coverage offered by the BBC

At least a couple of times a day now I have to do a double check halfway through reading a news story just to remind myself which site I'm actually on

Here's today's most recent example...



WTF!!?

Too difficult?!!

Being shit at making predictions has never stopped them before. And it has certainly proved to be no impediment to the Bank of England, the Meteorological Office, the Intelligence Services and just about every other fucker out there who's been earning a tidy living churning out dishonest bullshit

nope, I can't see any kind of a clear trend there...

For 'Too difficult' read 'We could make an objective, rigorous prediction but it's not the objective, rigorous prediction we're paid to make and we can't even pretend the lie is true anymore. So we're packing up and starting Christmas early, bye. PS UK house prices are fucked'

Me, I'm confidently predicting that 2009 is going to be a peach

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